Follow me as I aim to create a haunting Motion graphics sting for the Sky Arts Contest, my entry uses 3D animation and Maya fur and Shave and a Haircut

Sunday, 4 March 2012

Shave and haircut fur not rendering in glass material

Here are some pics of the problem I was having with explanations.

With the hair settings as they were, the moment the glass was added the fur failed to render. I played around with a lot of settings and had no luck. Then I found the tutorial I link to in my earlier post.

After following the steps I turn the hair into hair primatives I get the above, its fur but its grey. At least this time it renders in the glass case. to fix the problem I asign the same head material.

This is the result with caustics, final gather and raytracing, it looks good and this time took only a few minutes to render at HD.

I also wanted to increase the glasses refractive attributes to create this disjointed look. The shader I had was great for thin glass but to get the effect I wanted I would need to go back to a mia material but the black edges were still an issue. I fortunately found a great tutorial that explained the issue perfectly, it was written for 3ds max but the principles were the same. the issue was that the refraction rays in mental ray and the trace depth didnt match the same attributes in the glass material meaning that light entered the glass but didn't bounce back out causing the blackness. With that issue addressed the mia material glass rendered beautifully. Heres a link to that tutorial. http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/67-fix-the-black-edges-on-your-glass-material-and-other-stuff.html

The only problem is if you save the scene while the hairs are as hair primatives when you reopen the scene the fur is missing and rendering crashes maya! So the workaround is switch to hair primatives to render but switch back to buffer in the shave globals before saving and closing.